Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:36:57.317Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

(Re)examining the Insurance Model of Judicial Independence across Democracies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Brad Epperly
Brad Epperly*
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina
*
Contact the author at [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite being a dominant explanation of judicial independence in democracies for over a decade, the “insurance” model has received little systematic attention. I argue that how we conceptualize democracy is especially important for analyses of judicial independence employing this insurance framework, demanding more careful attention from scholars. I illustrate that empirical results are contingent on specific conceptualizations by replicating the single existing study examining the insurance model across democracies globally. In doing so, I demonstrate that existing findings are largely driven by classifying electoral authoritarian regimes like Kazakhstan and Russia as democracies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Fall 2018 , pp. 405 - 419
Copyright
© 2018 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Tobias Heinrich, Kirk Randazzo, David Klein, and reviewers at the Journal of Law and Courts for helpful suggestions on earlier iterations of the article. I would further like to thank Aylin Aydın for sharing the data from her original article and for comments on an earlier draft. The data and code replicating all of the results in this article are available in a zip file.

References

Alvarez, Michael, José A. Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, and Adam Przeworski. 1996. “Classifying Political Regimes.” Studies in Comparative International Development 31 (2): 3–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aydın, Aylin. 2013. “Judicial Independence across Democratic Regimes: Understanding the Varying Impact of Political Competition.” Law and Society Review 47 (1): 105–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boix, Carles, Michael Miller, and Sebastian Rosato. 2013. “A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800–2007.” Comparative Political Studies 46 (12): 1523–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheibub, José A., Jennifer Gandhi, and James R. Vreeland. 2010. “Democracy and Dictatorship Revisted.” Public Choice 143 (1): 67–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collier, David, and Steven Levitsky. 1997. “Democracy with Adjectives: Strategies to Avoid Conceptual Stretching.” World Politics 49 (3): 430–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epperly, Brad. 2013. “The Provision of Insurance? Judicial Independence and the Post-tenure Fate of Leaders.” Journal of Law and Courts 1 (2): 247–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epperly, Brad. 2017. “Political Competition and De Facto Judicial Independence in Non-democracies.” European Journal of Political Research 56 (2).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginsburg, Tom. 2003. Judicial Review in New Democracies: Constitutional Courts in Asian Cases. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ginsburg, Tom, and Tamir Moustafa. 2008. Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goemans, Hein, Kristian S. Gleditsch, and Giacomo Chiozza. 2009. “Introducing Archigos: A Data Set of Political Leaders.” Journal of Peace Research 46 (2): 269–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Llanos, Mariana, Cordula Tibi Weber, Charlotte Heyl, and Alexander Stroh. 2016. “Informal Interference in the Judiciary in New Democracies: A Comparison of Six African and Latin American Cases.” Democratization 23 (7): 1236–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moustafa, Tamir. 2007. The Struggle for Constitutional Power: Law, Politics, and Economic Development in Egypt. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munck, Gerardo L., and Jay Verkuilen. 2002. “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy.” Comparative Political Studies 35 (1): 5–34.Google Scholar
Popova, Maria. 2010. “Political Competition as an Obstacle to Judicial Independence: Evidence from Russia and Ukraine.” Comparative Political Studies 43 (10): 1202–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ríos-Figueroa, Julio, and Jeffrey K. Staton. 2012. “An Evaluation of Cross-National Measures of Judicial Independence.” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 30 (1): 104–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roessler, Philip, and Marc M. Howard. 2009. “Post-Cold War Political Regimes: When Do Elections Matter?” In Democratization by Elections, ed. Staffan I. Lindberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Rosberg, James. 1995. “The Rise of an Independent Judiciary in Egypt.” PhD diss., MIT.Google Scholar
Schedler, A. 2002. “The Menu of Manipulation.” Journal of Democracy 13 (2): 36–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephenson, Matthew C. 2003. “‘When the Devil Turns …’: The Political Foundations of Independent Judicial Review.” Journal of Legal Studies 32:59–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Mark, and Philipp Kuntz. 2006. “After Defeat: When Do Rulers Steal Elections?” In Electoral Authoritarianism: Dynamics of Unfree Competition, ed. Andreas Schedler. Boulder, CO: Rienner.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vanberg, Georg. 2005. The Politics of Constitutional Review in Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vanberg, Georg. 2015. “Constitutional Courts in Comparative Perspective: A Theoretical Assessment.” Annual Review of Political Science 18:167–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
VonDoepp, Peter, and Rachel Ellet. 2011. “Reworking Strategic Models of Executive-Judicial Relations: Insights from New African Democracies.” Comparative Politics 43:147–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Matthew C. 2014. “A Discreet Critique of Discrete Regime Type Data.” Comparative Political Studies 47 (5): 689–714.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Epperly supplementary material
Download undefined(File)
File 6.7 KB